Between, Georgia (7 page)

Genny, who was often twitchy and diffident around men, flat adored him. He was soft-spoken, and his low-pitched voice was like balm on her nerves, soothing and cool. Mama liked him, too, so they paused to chat, telling him I was expected in town on Saturday instead of Friday.

“Because of her divorce, you know,” Genny said in a confi-dential tone, her eyes gleaming. My mother released Genny’s signing hands to send her forefingers shooting triumphantly away from the corners of her mouth.

“ ‘Finally!’ Stacia says,” Genny interpreted. She gave her hands back to Stacia, so Stacia could feel the conversation. “I know divorce is wrong and all, but just between us and the little birds?

We’re glad. We don’t like that boy,” Genny said, signing at the same time.

Henry straightened his immaculate cuffs and quirked one black eyebrow at them. “Me neither,” he said.

They said their goodbyes, and Genny and Mama continued on to the diner. The special was written on a blackboard sign by the front door. Genny signed to Mama that it was Trude’s god-awful Turketti.

Mama made a sour face and signed,
Soup at home?

Genny hesitated, trying to choose between the evils of walking by the dogs and Turketti. At last she nodded her hand and they walked on, past the row of three kitschy antique marts and then Isaac’s house.

Crabtree Gas and Parts was directly across from the square, on Philbert. The gas pumps and the dilapidated country store faced the square, and beside it two mechanics’ bays yawped open like black mouths. The parts yard was behind the store, and humps of twisted slag metal and junk were visible over the store’s low roof. Philbert Street was the border that separated the town square from the Crabtrees’ squalid holdings. It was a different world across the street, and Bernese was not alone in thinking the complex was an eyesore.

Genny and Mama left the square and crossed to the corner of Grace and Philbert. The gas station was on their left, and there wasn’t anything to the right but a sloping shoulder that led into a ditch full of kudzu. Beyond that was nothing but rolling Georgia wilderness awash in loblolly pines and scrub. The sidewalk ran parallel to the fence that surrounded the parts yard. My two little squashy marshmallow ladies, joined at the hip, stepped up onto the sidewalk and went tootling down the length of the fence.

Mama held Genny’s elbow in her left hand, her right hand swinging her cane to check her path. Genny took three teeny bird steps for every long, careful stride of Mama’s, and the white cane tapped out the rhythm of their walk. In their print dresses and orthopedic shoes, they were completely innocuous. But as they walked, the male dogs appeared, one slinking out from under an old Chevy, the other easing his head from behind a rusted-out refrigerator.

The Bitch came out of nowhere. Genny did not see the dog until she loomed up beside them at the fence about halfway to the gate. The Bitch bared her teeth in a menacing parody of a grin, and the males growled so deep in their chests that Genny felt it as a vibration of the air more than she heard it. They moved like sleek black birds in formation, the two big males flanking the sinewy female. The Bitch let her breath out, something between a growl and a hiss.

Stacia could smell the dogs, and she felt Genny’s arm trembling. She stopped walking and began their pet argument, one as old as the dogs themselves. She tucked her cane under her arm and signed that they should walk home on the other side of Grace Street, to give the dogs a wider berth, then reached for Genny’s hands so she could feel the answer she already knew by heart.

Genny signed,
You know there’s no sidewalk. We’ll end up in the
ditch with every hip we’ve got smashed into fifty different pieces.

They started walking again. Mama knew she would never win the argument, but the ritual of asking seemed to soothe Genny.

The dogs started walking when they did. The hair on the Bitch’s spine rose, and her legs stiffened so that her usual lithe gait became eerily mechanical. All three flattened their ears so tightly against their sleek, elongated skulls that they looked like evil seals.

They came abreast of the gate. The Bitch, as always, tried to stuff her narrow head through. This time, however, the chain had been wrapped only twice, and as she levered her snout into the narrow crack, the gate gave.

Mama felt the muscles in Genny’s arm tighten. She stopped walking and reached for Genny’s hand just as it was opening, the fingers spreading into rigid lines. Then Genny was gone and Mama was pushed, staggering and falling a long way sideways, landing hard on her shoulder on a wide surface so nubbled and unyielding that she knew she was in the street. She felt her body bracing futilely as imagined cars came speeding toward her, and she lay there waiting to be dashed to pieces in the road.

After an endless moment, she realized she was still in one piece, and she tried to collect her wits. Her head was swimming, and the wind had been knocked out of her. She was dizzy from not breathing. She had to struggle to pull in a mouthful of air that was acrid with the smell of dog and road oil.

She rolled onto her stomach and got gingerly to her hands and knees, trying to feel her way to Genny or her cane or the curb.

But she had lost all sense of direction, and the street spread itself out flat and smooth under her hands. She smelled the bright copper of fresh blood mixing with the pollen of the May air, and she could feel it coming from her shoulder and arm. There seemed to be a lot of it. She did not know where Genny was, and she started pushing her air out in deep vibrating shoves. She pushed air out, hard, again and again, because years ago, when they were children, Genny had taught her that was how to make screaming happen.

Mama, deaf and blind, disoriented, didn’t know if the dogs were out or if a car had hit them, but Genny had seen exactly what was coming. To her, it had looked like the gate was giving birth to something evil. The Bitch’s face came shoving through first, stretched tight with the lips pulled back and open and her eyes showing a quarter inch of white. Then her head popped free and she got one shoulder through, her claws raking at the concrete. The two males barked violently, cheering the Bitch on. For an endless fraction of a second, it seemed she would stick at the second shoulder, but she braced her powerful back legs and shoved, twitching her shoulders back and forth, working herself out. Genny watched her long narrow hips slither through easily, and in two bounds, the Bitch was on her.

The dog hit Genny at an angle, knocking her into Mama.

Genny clutched at Mama, but her hand was ripped open by Mama’s weight as she fell. Mama’s cane sailed away in a high arc and then clattered and rolled in the street. Genny was falling, too, feeling hot breath and then the slide of the dog’s teeth against her skin as they missed a spine-snapping hold on the back of her neck. She turned in midair with the dog still on her, and she hunched her shoulders up high, shoving uselessly at the dog with her little fat seamstress’s hands. The two of them landed together, the dog’s weight slamming into her stomach. It got its teeth in her, puncturing the meat of her upper arm and then releasing and digging into her at the shoulder.

The Bitch shook her head back and forth, jerking at Genny.

The pain was immediate and awful but very welcome, because it was stronger than the fear. Once the pain started, she could think; she could clinically feel her flesh tearing away and the smoky heat of the dog’s body bracing into hers. Genny thrust her forearm in the dog’s throat and began beating at the Bitch’s back with her other hand, shoving herself along the sidewalk with her feet. She could feel the concrete tearing her dress and the skin of her back as she wormed away. She didn’t care. She had to get out from under, because she knew when the two big males came, she would be dead in a matter of seconds, and she absolutely could not be dead. She heard Mama screaming, and in her very center, in some calm place that was watching with mild interest as the dog killed her, a voice said, “Oh, that’s probably a good idea,” so she started screaming, too.

Henry Crabtree was trying to sell a Dennis Lehane on tape to a trucker who had stopped in to see if the bookstore carried any decent porn. Henry made a lot of sales this way; the truckers who paused in Between to gas up generally took to him. There was something a bit dirty about Henry that belied his crisp white shirts and fine-boned face. It lived in the hollows of his severely cut cheekbones or maybe in the permanent dark circles that made his eyes look deep-set and older than the rest of him. It was hard to pin down, but Henry seemed like he might have an opium pipe or an ivory-handled knife in the back pocket of his tailored khaki pants.

He had the trucker all but sold when he heard my mama start screaming. At first he couldn’t identify the source of the wail; it didn’t sound human. He looked quizzically at the trucker, who shrugged.

“Steam whistle?” the trucker said.

Then Genny started screaming, too, and Henry said, “No,”

and vaulted the counter, knocking the big trucker aside and sprinting out the door. Bernese had come out of her store already and was puffing past, her stocky legs pumping as she ran toward her sisters. Henry passed Bernese easily, and as he went by the diner, he yelled, “Call 911” to Trude, who was standing openmouthed in the doorway. She disappeared back inside.

The Bitch already had Genny by the time Henry could see them. The male dogs were practically scraping the skin off their heads trying to get through the gap in the gate. Stacia was crawl-ing down the center of the road, keening. Henry didn’t stop; he was afraid that at any moment the Bitch would burrow down deep enough into Genny’s neck to tear open an artery.

Henry threw himself onto the dog, trying to lever her mouth open with his hands. His long black hair escaped its leather tie and got into his eyes, blinding him, and in that moment the dog released Genny and clamped down hard on his forearm.

Ona Crabtree came loping around the corner from the front of the gas station with her graying red hair slopping out of its bun.

She was calling, “Here, dog, got-dammit, here, dog, here, got-dammit, here.” The Bitch ignored her, but the males froze immediately and slunk away from the fence. Lobe was at Ona’s heels, red-faced and sweating in his coveralls. He came bearing down on the scene with a choke chain and a grim expression, his bushy orange beard bristling fiercely.

Bernese huffed up and peeled Stacia up out of the street, then led her to the side of the road. Stacia was signing in frenzied bursts, and Bernese, who had never learned ASL, was trying to capture her hands and manually spell out “OK” into them. She was so flustered that she was actually signing “BK, BK, BK” over and over again, and Mama was slapping at her and trying to sign at the same time.

Together with Henry, Lobe managed to wrestle the choke chain over the Bitch’s head. He jerked back on the chain, putting his weight into it so that the choke cinched and the dog was pulled off of Genny, who immediately rolled over and began worming her way up the sidewalk, weeping.

Ona Crabtree arrived and went at the Bitch with her bony bare feet, kicking so violently that her housedress flipped up, showing her varicose veins. “Piece of shit! Piece of shit!” she cawed, and the dog dropped to her belly and cringed like a meek puppy, her mouth still foamy with Genny’s blood.

Without a word, Lobe turned and started dragging the Bitch back toward the gas station. Ona opened the combination lock and began rewrapping the chain that held the gate. She got it shut properly and then marched off after Lobe. The sidewalk was freckled with small puddles and spatters of blood, both Genny’s and Henry’s. It was a fake bright Hollywood red but was already drying to brown at the edges. Ona had walked through the worst of it, and her right foot left four red prints, one after another, growing sketchier as she stomped back around the corner to the gas station.

Henry pulled off his shredded shirt, crouched down beside Genny, and pressed the shirt hard into her shoulder to stanch her bleeding, ignoring his own wounded arm. Genny was only semiconscious; she’d crept off the sidewalk into the strip of grass beside the fence. Henry pulled her up into his lap to try to elevate her wounded shoulder, still applying pressure.

Isaac Davids had come out of his law office and was making his way down Grace Street as quickly as he could with his cane.

Trude from the diner followed with her arms full of paper towels, as if she planned to clean up the street. Behind them, Mr. and Mrs. Marchant were toddling as fast as they could from their bed-and-breakfast, their daughter, Ivy, and Amy Bend from the Sweete Shoppe urging them on. The doors of the antique marts were opening, and worried faces were peering out.

Bernese had given up trying to communicate with Stacia, and Stacia was breathing like a steam engine, red-faced and trembling, silently demanding Genny in their shared language.

Henry could hear the sirens of the ambulance coming to Between from Loganville, and just as it seemed things would calm down, that moron Lobe kicked the cringing Bitch out the back door of the station, back into the parts yard. The minute the back door shut, the Bitch untucked the stump of her tail and charged at the fence, growling, hackles rising. Genny heard her and struggled with Henry, trying to sit up, screaming as the dog’s leering face came up against the fence not two feet from her own. Trude went into gratuitous hysterics, but at least she gave Bernese someone to slap.

When the ambulance arrived, it was all chaos with Lobe and Ona Crabtree taking turns screaming profanities out the back door, trying to quell the dogs by sheer volume. Genny was wailing, Henry was bleeding and dizzy, and Trude was hollering at Bernese, who was clearly itching to slap her again. Everyone else was milling around wringing their hands and tracking through the blood and generally getting in the way. Mama’s back was bleeding from where she’d scraped it in the street, and she was reaching out with both arms, trying to touch something, the fence or the side of a car or a person, anything that would help her orient.